October 8, 2009

Thanks to the efforts of one of the people who comments on here, Noise, we have been able to obtain the testimony of Erik Rigler at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial. Rigler was a summary witness who described to the jury a chapter of the Justice Department’s inspector general’s report into the FBI’s pre-9/11 failings. The testimony concerned chapter 5 in the report, which detailed the problems with the 9/11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.

The testimony was split over two days; you can find the first day here, and the second day here.

Some of the Moussaoui trial transcripts have been published around the web, mostly by Cryptome, but a lot of it is still missing, so we are happy to get this.

Those who are familiar with the issues here will not learn much new from the testimony, as it is only a summary of a chapter in a report that has been available to the public for a couple of years now. However, those who are not familiar with the issues might find it a good introduction.

Having said that, what I found most interesting was that Rigler did not summarise the declassified version of the report, but the classified version, which contains some really key points that don’t appear in the unclassified version (and is still unavailable, so you are getting a peek at what you are not supposed to know). These three points concern the badness of Tom Wilshire, the badness of Rodney Middleton and the badness of Dina Corsi (note: last two entries to be published soon).